Collaboration Across Cyberspace: NNLM’s Wikipedia Editing Campaigns

Wikipedia’s health topics pages are visited a staggering 7 billion times per year, so it is vital that rather than futilely discouraging Wikipedia use, information professionals and educators strive to improve the crowd-sourced encyclopedia’s reliability and encourage informed use of this hugely popular resource. To that end, the National Network of Libraries of Medicine has organized a series of Wikipedia editing campaigns focused on improving Wikipedia’s health and medicine articles. These editing campaigns have incorporated in-person edit-a-thons as well as virtual events, and have engaged hundreds of students, faculty, and library staff (many of whom were new to Wikipedia editing) across the country in collaborative efforts to ensure universal access to high-quality health information. Through organizing these events, our successes have inspired us to confront our challenges with creativity, and each campaign has taught us ways to improve the next. This session will present NNLM’s Wikipedia editing campaigns as an ever-evolving program model incorporating elements of outreach and engagement, marketing, communication, and instruction to distant participants. Attendees will learn about the importance of Wikipedia as a resource for health information and the basics of editing, how we have worked to engage individuals and organizations virtually, the challenges we have faced and the steps we have taken to overcome them, and our outlook on the great potential for distance engagement we see in these campaigns